Abstract
Based on the theory of emotional contagion and goal content, this study explored the positive associations between a leader's work passion and employees' work passion. This study investigated 364 employees and their immediate leaders from China, constructed a moderated mediation model, and used SPSS-PROCESS in conjunction with the Johnson-Neyman technique to analyze the data. The results showed that a leader's work passion was transferred to employees via emotional contagion, and the contagion process was moderated by leader–employee goal content congruence. This study provides a potential way to stimulate employees' work passion from the perspective of leader–employee interactions. Moreover, the limitations of the study and potential topics for future research are discussed.
Highlights
Work passion is a strong inclination toward work that people like, find important, and want to invest their time and energy in (Vallerand and Houlfort, 2003)
Work passion may enhance employees’ positive affect experience (Forest et al, 2011; Donahue et al, 2012) and organizational citizenship behavior at work (Astakhova, 2015; Burke et al, 2015), and it may improve employees’ work performance (Ho et al, 2011; Bélanger et al, 2013; Burke et al, 2015) as well as their well-being (Zigarmi et al, 2009; Birkeland, 2014), which is the target of organizational positive psychology research (Di Fabio and Palazzeschi, 2015; Di Fabio et al, 2016)
It is important to the field of organizational psychology to consider whether a leader’s work passion may be transmitted to employees
Summary
Work passion is a strong inclination toward work that people like, find important, and want to invest their time and energy in (Vallerand and Houlfort, 2003). Both organizational researchers and practitioners have noted the importance of work passion (Boyatzis et al, 2002; McDaniel et al, 2009). It is important to the field of organizational psychology to consider whether a leader’s work passion may be transmitted to employees. This is the first issue we aim to explore
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